Fitzgerald: Another sweetly sinister opinion poll

About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews. -- from this news article

These opinion polls, where it is Muslims who are being polled, are always skewed -- but not, as with other opinion polls, skewed now this way and now that way. These are skewed in only one way. No Muslim, being interviewed as to whether or not he "approves" of a terrorist act, is going to say he approves of it if he does not. In other words, there will be no cases in which someone will declare, falsely, that he approves. Compare this to a public opinion poll about support for candidates, in which one can imagine, in a despotism, people lying about whom they will support, or even in a democracy, lying in order to meet the expectations, as they see it, of the interviewer. How many Americans right now may be afraid of being thought either "racist" (so answering one way) or "sexist" (so answering another)?

They are especially skewed because Muslims know perfectly well when the results are to be disseminated among non-Muslims, and they know perfectly well that non-Muslims are watching keenly for signs of support for violence.

So the figure of 91 million is not the absolute largest number of Muslims who support the most outrageous and famous attack on non-Muslim civilians, that of 9/11/2001, but the absolute rock-bottom number. And since it is a principle of Islam that "war is deception," since that injunction from Muhammad himself led to religiously-sanctioned dissimulation, that is not limited to Taqiyya (which originates in Shia Islam but is no longer limited to it) and Kitman ("mental reservation") but has become a perfectly normal and natural way for Muslims to deal with non-Muslims when speaking about Islam, the entire spectacle of this Opinion Poll is not one that should comfort anyone, but rather be seen as the ludicrous effort it always was intended to be, to calm our fears.

We discount many of the responses, as they are simply designed to allay non-Muslim fears. This is especially true since those fears, if they grow, might actually lead to an ending of Muslim migration to Infidel lands. That is something they do not wish to see stopped, not now and not ever. It might lead also to a hardening of Infidel attitudes toward Muslim demands, made at every level, for changes in the social arrangements (from women's gym hours) to those of the workplace (the demands for prayer rooms and time off, five times a day, for the canonical prayers), to public spaces (again, those prayer rooms or at least those "shared prayer rooms" that quickly become open for "Muslims Only"), to legal codes (demands for the Shari'a to be imposed on Muslims as a "community"), to political institutions (demands for changes in the basic understandings, including the rights guaranteed in this country by the Free Speech and Free Exercise clauses). Many Muslims wish to transform these so that they no longer constitute what they consider an "obstacle" to the spread, and future dominance, of Islam.

It is your guess, or mine, how many answered with a lie.

It is also your guess, and mine, as to how many who claim to have been opposed to the 9/11/2001 attacks nonetheless have no trouble defending terrorist attacks on, say, Israel by Hamas and Hizballah and Islamic Jihad and, before them all, by the PLO. They may also have no trouble defending the terrorism of Pakistani and Indian groups that have driven 400,000 Hindus out of Kashmir, and that result in bombs being set off in Mumbai and attacks on the Indian Parliament in Delhi. And how many of those answering now claim to be opposed to the 9/11/2001 attacks just the way some imams did, when they noisily joined Interfaith Vigils, only for the security services to subsequently discover that their real views -- sometimes caught on tape -- were quite other, forcing some of them to flee abroad, and others to lie low?

What do the defectors say, those who, just like KGB defectors during the Cold War, are the surest and truest guides to what Muslims are taught to think, what the attitudes and atmospherics of those growing up in states or societies or even families suffused with Islam, really think when they know there are no Infidels around to eavesdrop? We know what the defectors think. Ask Wafa Sultan. Or Nonie Darwish. Or Ibn Warraq. Or Irfan Khawaja. Or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Or Ali Sina. To a man and a woman, they all think the same thing, about what Islam inculcates, and what a great many Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Muslims, therefore believe. And the numbers of those who support violent Jihad, through what we have no difficulty calling "terrorism" but that they consider to be legitimate "combat" or qitaal, would not then be 91 million, but five or ten times that number.

And what about those who don't support Jihad through terrorism? Oh, those? They support it through other means, through deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, demographic conquest from within the Bilad al-kufr. If the goal is the same -- the spread and dominance, all over the world, of Islam -- does it matter quite so much which instruments one chooses to further that goal? Is demographic conquest, are campaigns of Da'wa, less of a permanent threat?

Missing-the-pointness is the essence of this sweetly sinister, meant-to-comfort but deeply discomforting, opinion poll.

A word to the wise.

Keep your powder dry.

Count those spoons even faster.

Und so weiter.

Posted by Hugh at February 28, 2008 12:21 PM
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